Editors’ Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. xii-16
Author(s):  
Bethany J. Walker ◽  
Timothy Insoll ◽  
Corisande Fenwick
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Islamic Art ◽  
Islamic History ◽  
Islamic World ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Conceptual Problems ◽  
Islamic Archaeology ◽  
Historical Periods

The following Foreword, written by the three co-editors of this Handbook, situates the field of Islamic archaeology as it is practiced today in the larger study of the Islamic world. It also positions this Handbook in a growing body of scholarship on the archaeology of Islam. The special challenges faced by a newly emerging field, and one that is concerned with relatively recent historical periods and is quite literally global in scale, is presented in honest debate. The relationships of Islamic archaeology with Islamic art history and Islamic history are problematized, and the conceptual problems of Islamization and periodization explicated are and explored. The Foreword closes with a justification for the global scale of this Handbook, which determines its geographical organization.

The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Archaeology

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Islamic Art ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
And Migration ◽  
Islamic Archaeology ◽  
First Time

Born from the fields of Islamic art and architectural history, the archaeological study of the Islamic societies is a relatively young discipline. With its roots in the colonial periods of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, its rapid development since the 1980s warrants a reevaluation of where the field stands today. This Handbook represents for the first time a survey of Islamic archaeology on a global scale, describing its disciplinary development and offering candid critiques of the state of the field today in the Central Islamic Lands, the Islamic West, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia. The international contributors to the volume address such themes as the timing and process of Islamization, the problems of periodization and regionalism in material culture, cities and countryside, cultural hybridity, cultural and religious diversity, natural resource management, international trade in the later historical periods, and migration. Critical assessments of the ways in which archaeologists today engage with Islamic cultural heritage and local communities closes the volume, highlighting the ethical issues related to studying living cultures and religions.

The Islamic West

2020 ◽  
pp. 239-242
Author(s):  
Corisande Fenwick
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Art History ◽  
Islamic Art ◽  
Islamic Archaeology ◽  
New Generation ◽  
Quality Of Research

This text provides a brief introduction to the chapters focusing on the Islamic West. Long neglected by Anglophone academics, this region was pivotal in the development of Islamic art history and archaeology as a discipline, but, over the course of the 20th century it came to be regarded as peripheral to broader debates in Islamic archaeology. Since the 1970s, a new generation of Islamic archaeologists working in Europe, North Africa, and the Sahara has transformed our understanding of the region, though the amount and quality of research remains uneven in different countries.

Arabesques, Unicorns, and Invisible Masters: The Art Historian’s Gaze as Symptomatic Action?

2015 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 213-232
Author(s):  
Eva-Maria Troelenberg
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Islamic Art ◽  
Methodological Development ◽  
World War ◽  
Taxonomic History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Methods ◽  
Second World

This essay takes two seminal texts of mid-twentieth-century Islamic art history as case studies for the methodological development of the scholarly gaze in the aftermath of the Second World War. Ernst Kühnel’s Die Arabeske (Wiesbaden, 1949) testifies to the continuity of a taxonomic history of styles, rooted in phenomenologist Sachforschung and apparently adaptable to shifting ideological paradigms. Richard Ettinghausen’s The Unicorn (Washington, 1950) stands for a neo-humanist approach. Its negotiation of aesthetic and cultural difference clearly is to be considered against the background of the experience of exile, but also of the rising tide of democratic humanism characteristic for postwar American humanities. Both examples together offer a comparative perspective on the agencies of art historical methods and their ideological and epistemological promises and pitfalls in dealing with aesthetic difference. Consequently, this essay also seeks to contribute exemplary insights into the immediate prehistory of the so-called “Global Turn” in art history. 


scholarly journals Shifting Horizons - A Line and Its Movement in Art, History and Philosophy

2022 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Everyday Experience ◽  
Horizon Line ◽  
Literature History ◽  
Historical Periods

What happens when horizons shift? More specifically, what occurs when that line, which in everyday experience appears so consistent and omnipresent, reveals itself to be contingent? And if the horizon line is mutable, what does that imply about the systems of knowledge, order, and faith that the seemingly immutable horizon appears to neatly delimit and order? These are the questions that the volume of essays addresses, offering perspectives from multiple historical periods and disciplines that tackle instances in literature, history, and art in which shifts in conceptualizing the horizon made themselves manifest.

scholarly journals Armenia – Georgia – Islam A Need to Break Taboos in the Study of Medieval Architecture

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Donabédian
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Studies ◽  
Art History ◽  
The Other ◽  
Islamic Art ◽  
South Caucasus ◽  
Medieval Architecture ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship

Two important spheres of the history of medieval architecture in the Anatolia-Armenia-South-Caucasian region remain insufficiently explored due to some kind of taboos that still hinder their study. This concerns the relationship between Armenia and Georgia on the one hand, and between Armenia and the Islamic art developed in today’s Turkey and South Caucasus during the Seljuk and Mongol periods, on the other. Although its impartial study is essential for a good understanding of art history, the question of the relationship between these entities remains hampered by several prejudices, due mainly to nationalism and a lack of communication, particularly within the countries concerned. The Author believes in the path that some bold authors are beginning to clear, that of an unbiased approach, free of any national passion. He calls for a systematic and dispassionate development of comparative studies in all appropriate aspects of these three arts. The time has come to break taboos.

Screening the Art World

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Temenuga Trifonova
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Art History ◽  
Art World ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Historical Periods

Unlike most studies of the relationship between cinema and art, which privilege questions of medium or institutional specificity and intermediality, Screening the Art World explores the ways in which artists and the art world more generally have been represented in cinema. Contributors address a rarely explored subject -art in cinema, rather than the art of cinema - by considering films across genres, historical periods and national cinemas in order to reflect on cinema’s fluctuating imaginary of ‘art’ and ‘the art world’. The book examines the intersection of art history with history in cinema, cinema’s simultaneous affirmation and denigration of the idea of art as ‘truth’ and what this means for cinema’s understanding of itself, the dominant, often contradictory ways in which artists have been represented on screen, and cinematic representations of the art world’s tenuous position between commercial good and cultural capital.

Epilogue

2020 ◽  
pp. 226-230
Author(s):  
Cailah Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
The Political ◽  
Islamic Art ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Complex Objects ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Visual Properties ◽  
Artistic Communities

THIS BOOK HAS uncovered the aesthetic variety and documentary richness of the Islamic arts of the book of the late medieval Lands of Rūm and produced new ways of understanding this material in its proper cultural and intellectual contexts. It has done so by considering the manuscripts as ‘whole’, complex objects. This approach has entailed looking closely at the codicological and visual properties of the manuscripts themselves, reading their inscriptions and analysing this material within a framework that accounts for patronage beyond dynastic confines – a facet that is sometimes overlooked in the wider scholarly field of Islamic art history. The manuscripts discussed here show that some of Rūm’s cities (particularly Konya) were home to dynamic artistic communities that consisted of local and émigré craftsmen, including converts to Islam and, possibly, Christians. This material also reveals that patrons were often drawn from the political classes, but were, generally speaking, otherwise not well-known from historical sources. In some cases, patrons’ affiliations and intellectual interests challenge simplistic or unambiguous conceptions of the ‘frontier’ and the role of ‘Turkishness’ in late medieval Rūm....

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